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In this community, you can submit ideas, vote on existing ideas, or add comments.

To submit an idea, please click the Submit New Idea button at the top of the navigation sidebar. You will then be asked to add a title and choose a campaign for the new idea. You will also have the option to add tags to the idea. To vote on an idea, simply click the up or down arrows to the right of the idea title/description. And to add a comment, click in the box below the idea.

If you would like to see all ideas created with a specific tag, you can click on the word or phrase via the tagcloud in the navigation sidebar area under "What we're discussing". You can also view ideas sorted by Campaigns from the right navigation area. To return to this page, click the All Ideas link.

Title: Profiling local areas: deprivation and its relationships with local needs and priorities
What is it you want to achieve/solve?:
• Focus on a key, local strategic issue or priority (such as crime reduction, or improving public health) and:
o Test and demonstrate how, through using open data standards, we can find smarter ways of bringing together and visualising data from multiple (national and local) sources
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Voting

What do we want to achieve?
A complete, accurate and maintaind open dataset for the UK’s public & community toilets, (whether managed by public or private sector) that includes location and other information needed for people to know if the facility is accessible to them (e.g opening times, access, provision…)
It sounds like something that would exist. It doesn't, although there are projects trying to crowd-source it.
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Voting

What do we want to achieve:
Enable people to find public blue badge parking bays online in a locally defined area - perhaps if they are new to disabled parking or if they are visiting an unfamiliar area.
What are the apparent barriers?:
Lack of Data on the location of blue badge parking bays.
Who is the audience?:
People who use disabled parking themselves or on behalf of a disabled person
Mentor: Sue Castling/Sheenagh
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Voting

What do we want to achieve:
Local Directgov has made available several open data sets and we would like you to explore ways to use the data in conjunction with other data sets in the public and voluntary sector.
We have a list of Local Directgov locator links for over 240 local authority services. Links are based on the Local Government Service List (LGSL) and Local Government Interaction List (LGIL). LGSL/LGIL identifiers
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Voting

What is it you want to achieve/solve?:
What is the most popular type of information that people look for while they’re on the move? Travel information and up to date please! What is the technology that’s most useful when you’re on the move? Smart phones!
So what we would like is to explore the development of apps that enable people to find out travel information where they are. If London can do it, other local areas
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Voting

What do we want to achieve:
Our challenge is to define and develop transactions and tools such as decision trees etc that will customise the information to the needs of the citizen.
Example: The articles published on Directgov about buying a home are very content driven. The reader may have to plough through several articles to find the specific information they are interested in. These are the articles that we have
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Voting

What is it you want to achieve/solve?:
Publishing local authority revenue and capital budgets, as data, so that planned spending and income, can be visualised, compared, and accumulated for a region. Link to some key metrics for each expenditure heading to bring context and meaningful comparisons.
Who is the audience?:
• Residents
• Journalists
What data sets are available/needed?:
• Local Authority budgets as data.
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Voting

What do I want to achieve?
Ability for people at one sitting to find out about local community activities in their areas - by area and by type of activity, to volunteer online and to complete the transaction in one sitting - without recourse to phoning or emailing expressing an interest and then waiting for a reply.
Who is the audience?
Voluntary/community organisations, local authorities and other public service
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Voting

What is it you want to achieve/solve?:
How can we combine the open data that local authorities have on public services and public facilities with information that other groups have on “things to do” locally? This could be really useful to people who have just moved into the local area but also to people who are just visiting!
We talk about Trip Advisor for public services, but if we had a rating system for all local
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Voting

As I understand it, each council holds a definitive map and description of the legal rights of way, including footpaths, bridleways, byways, etc. This data is shared with OS to produce various paper maps and these are used by walkers and cyclists to plan their leisure activities. OS Opendata has released a great deal of map data but rights of way information is lacking. This data should be made available to encourage
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Voting

I am part of a community creating open data maps. We use open data sets to validate our maps and to improve them. Here is a list of data that councils might be holding and would be useful to us. Even just having the addresses is a great help. Knowing the location too would be great. Some types of features are of more interest than others, so we can prioritise - we don't need this data in one big release!
Interesting
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Voting

What is it you want to achieve/solve?:
There are many plans, strategies, priorities, and so on from many public sector bodies ( some working in partnerships ), that affect many stakeholder groups. How can a person, locality, business, community etc find those that will impact on them?
Who is the audience?:
• Those that will be affected by the plans of local public sector organisations
What data sets are available/needed?:
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Voting

What is it you want to achieve/solve?:
Publish Air Quality data collected by individual Local Authorities, and by DEFRA, in a form that can be joined up with similar data, and with other data such as
• Demographics
• Health Incidents
• Carbon Emissions
• Traffic Counts
... to highlight correlations, and to inform local people so that they can see if ‘Air Quality’ is an issue that should be a priority in their area.
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Voting

What is it you want to achieve/solve?:
Local authorities have data on people (demographic) and services (where they’re based and how they perform). But what about if people could “rate” not just our services but how they feel about their community?
There are tools which enable people to rate services and others which rate feelings and others which do a mix of both. There are others which aren’t public service specific
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Voting

There are many open datasets released by the government and they can be improved by public annotation. The government keeps their data set separate and doesn't improve their data based on the corrections that are freely available. I am particularly thinking of location data, but occasionally public services are renamed and the original government database is not kept up to date. The annotations made by the public would
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Voting

Data quality , which means the age, the accuracy and the consistency of data is a vital consideration.
For example an error of 5 meters in Blue Badge parking data can put the spot on the other side of the street with the nearest crossing point 250 meters away - not good for a wheelchair user. Similarly a bus timetable that is a year old is worse than useless. Badly completed data e.g.: zero's in postcodes entered as
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Voting

I'd like to see a tool which helps councils identify the data they've got, and the format they could publish it in.
It would essentially be a big grid, with datasets listed along one axis and councils listed on the other. If a council publishes the dataset they can tick the box, and provide notes on how they did it, such as the format used.
Reasons for doing this:
1. Helps councils to realise what data they have.
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Voting

Campaigns

Really Useful Challenges

Register for the 'Really Useful' event here
It is terribly easy to use open data sets to present information in new ways but it is more of a challenge to develop innovative use of data sets to really make a difference to the way we shape policies and deliver services in the public sector.
At our 'Really Useful' event on July 1, we want developers to sit down with public sector practitioners to explore some ideas for innovative use of data and possible solutions that could introduce real efficiencies into ways of working.
You can vote for the challenges posted on this page and comment on them so that we can take the most popular challenges and develop functional specifications that can be further developed either at hack days or by like minded organisations. We have pre-populated the site with some challenges already but we would love you to add your ideas as challenges.
Click here for a quick guide challenge format.
Register for the 'Really Useful' event here